The visual always sorts automatically — you do not need to sort your data beforehand. If bars seem unsorted, check that:

• The Value field contains a numeric measure (not a text field or a calculated column).
• The measure resolves to a positive number for each row. Rows with null or zero values may be ignored.
• You are not applying a report-level sort that conflicts with the visual's internal sort.

Line 1 is pre-configured to 80% by default. You can change it in Format Pane → Reference Lines → Line 1 threshold. Set the value to any cumulative percentage between 1 and 99. You can add a second line (e.g. 60%) and a third line at any value (Pro only).

License validation happens asynchronously after the visual first renders, so for a moment after opening a report the chart is drawn on the Free tier. Give it a second and it re-renders with your Pro settings applied. If it persists:

• Make sure you are signed into Power BI with the Microsoft account that purchased the license.
• Check that the license is active in My Account → Licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Try closing and reopening the report.

Every setting in the format pane is listed for all users, and the ones included in the Pro plan carry (Pro) in their name — bin size, outlier exclusion, bar border, bar gap, value labels and the third reference line. They are shown rather than hidden so you can see what the plan includes before deciding.

If you change one without a licence, the chart keeps rendering the Free result and Power BI shows its own notification with a link to get a licence. Nothing is lost: your setting is stored and takes effect as soon as the licence is active.

Add a hierarchy to the Entity field well (e.g. Product Category → Product Subcategory → SKU). The drill buttons appear in the visual header. Click the single arrow to drill down one level across all bins, or click a specific bar and use the fork arrow to drill into that selection. The Pareto recalculates automatically at each level.

Yes, from version 1.3.0.0. In Format Pane → Pareto → Bar color, click the fx button for the rule-based dialog — gradient, rules or field value, the same as a native visual.

One thing to understand about the result: Power BI resolves the rule per entity, but a bar is a bin holding many entities. Each bar takes the color of its top-ranked entity, falling back to the first entity in the bin that the rule resolves. So with a gradient, a bar shows where its largest member sits on the scale, not the average of the bin.

If what you want is to color bars by their position in the Pareto rather than by a field, use Threshold Colors instead — see below. It is usually the more useful of the two.

Format Pane → Threshold Colors colors each bar by where it falls relative to a cumulative percentage threshold — 80% by default. Bars within the threshold take one color, bars beyond it another, and the bin where the cumulative line actually crosses can be highlighted separately.

This answers the question a Pareto is usually asked: which share of entities is the vital few, and where exactly does the line cross? The fx dialog colors by a field value; Threshold Colors color by position in the distribution.

When both are on, Threshold Colors wins. The full precedence is: high contrast → IBCS Mode → Threshold Colors → fx rule → the constant Bar color.

This is usually a license assignment issue. Make sure the Pro license is assigned to the user account that is viewing the report in Power BI Service, not only to the account that published it. License assignment is managed in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

It depends on where the report runs:

• Power BI Service: the visual streams data in segments and supports 500,000+ entities. The first segment is 30,000 rows; further segments are fetched automatically.
• Power BI Desktop: segment fetching is not available, so the visual is capped at 30,000 rows and shows a "Data limited to 30,000 rows" notice. This is a Power BI Desktop platform limitation, not a tier limit — the row cap is identical in Free and Pro.

Because entities are grouped into bins, size rarely hurts readability: 10,000 SKUs render as 5 bars at the Free 20% bin size, or 10 bars at a Pro 10% bin size. What size does affect is cross-filtering — see Performance & scale for how to choose a bin size for your model.

Yes. When Windows or Power BI high contrast mode is active, the visual automatically uses system foreground and background colors for all chart elements — bars, lines, axes, dots, and reference lines — to meet accessibility requirements.

No. All data processing happens locally inside Power BI. The only external network request is the license validation call to the Microsoft licensing API (IVisualLicenseManager) — this is the standard Power BI mechanism and shares no report data. See the Privacy Policy for full details.

Open an issue on GitHub. For billing questions or private inquiries, email us directly (see the contact section below). Please include your Power BI Desktop version, visual version, and a screenshot or sample .pbix if possible.